How do I find files that do not contain a given string pattern?

Question

How do I find out the files in the current directory which do not contain the word foo (using grep)?

Answer 1

Problem

I need to refactor a large project which uses .phtml files to write out HTML using inline PHP code. I want to use Mustache templates instead. I want to find any .phtml giles which do not contain the string new Mustache as these still need to be rewritten.

Solution

find . -iname '*.phtml' -exec grep -H -E -o -c 'new Mustache' {} \; | grep :0$ | sed 's/..$//'

Explanation

Before the pipes:

Find

find . Find files recursively, starting in this directory

-iname '*.phtml' Filename must contain .phtml (the i makes it case-insensitive)

-exec 'grep -H -E -o -c 'new Mustache' {}' Run the grep command on each of the matched paths

Grep

-H Always print filename headers with output lines.

-E Interpret pattern as an extended regular expression (i.e. force grep to behave as egrep).

-o Prints only the matching part of the lines.

-c Only a count of selected lines is written to standard output.

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This will give me a list of all file paths ending in .phtml, with a count of the number of times the string new Mustache occurs in each of them.

$> find . -iname '*.phtml$' -exec 'grep -H -E -o -c 'new Mustache' {}'\;

./app/MyApp/Customer/View/Account/quickcodemanagestore.phtml:0
./app/MyApp/Customer/View/Account/studio.phtml:0
./app/MyApp/Customer/View/Account/orders.phtml:1
./app/MyApp/Customer/View/Account/banking.phtml:1
./app/MyApp/Customer/View/Account/applycomplete.phtml:1
./app/MyApp/Customer/View/Account/catalogue.phtml:1
./app/MyApp/Customer/View/Account/classadd.phtml:0
./app/MyApp/Customer/View/Account/orders-trade.phtml:0

The first pipe grep :0$ filters this list to only include lines ending in :0:

$> find . -iname '*.phtml' -exec grep -H -E -o -c 'new Mustache' {} \; | grep :0$

./app/MyApp/Customer/View/Account/quickcodemanagestore.phtml:0
./app/MyApp/Customer/View/Account/studio.phtml:0
./app/MyApp/Customer/View/Account/classadd.phtml:0
./app/MyApp/Customer/View/Account/orders-trade.phtml:0

The second pipe sed 's/..$//' strips off the final two characters of each line, leaving just the file paths.

$> find . -iname '*.phtml' -exec grep -H -E -o -c 'new Mustache' {} \; | grep :0$ | sed 's/..$//'

./app/MyApp/Customer/View/Account/quickcodemanagestore.phtml
./app/MyApp/Customer/View/Account/studio.phtml
./app/MyApp/Customer/View/Account/classadd.phtml
./app/MyApp/Customer/View/Account/orders-trade.phtml